Original Research by School Decision on Mccormick School
McCormick School serves prekindergarten through eighth grade in the small rural town of Troy, Montana, and it is an unusually small school. Its enrollment is low enough that the state suppressed its standardized test results to protect student privacy, meaning no math, English language arts, or science proficiency rates are available for public reporting. For a parent this is the central fact: the school is too small to generate the typical public performance data. Only a handful of students took the Smarter Balanced assessments in each subject, and the numbers are simply not published. That does not indicate failure or success; it reflects the scale of the institution. A family looking at this school will need to form their own picture of academic quality through direct conversation with the staff and a visit to the classrooms.
The student body is homogeneous: every enrolled student is identified as white. No data on free or reduced-price meal eligibility, special education services, or English learner status was reported. This is a common pattern in very small schools where such counts could identify individual students. The school serves kindergarten through eighth grade, with the largest single grade being kindergarten; the eighth grade has no students enrolled at all. Grade-by-grade enrollment is thin, often one to four children per grade.
The community context matters here. Troy sits in the Kootenai River gorge between the Purcell and Cabinet Mountains, a place shaped by mining, logging, and a strong outdoor recreation culture. The town has experienced economic strain from mine closures, an EPA Superfund cleanup that was largely completed several years ago, and population decline. Housing values in the area sit near the national benchmark, but the local economy is constrained. The school itself is part of the McCormick Elem district, a very small rural K-8 district serving about eighteen to twenty-one students total. No recent district-level changes such as referenda, curriculum shifts, or property-tax measures surfaced in publicly available records.
Given the suppression of testing data, the comparison to other districts in Lincoln County could not be calculated for proficiency, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism. Those fields simply do not apply at this scale. The school is not a charter or magnet, and its Title I status was not reported.
What a parent can assess is the setting. Troy offers in-town trails, parks, ball fields, a disc golf course, and the Kootenai River for recreation. The school is integrated into the small-town fabric rather than sitting on a separate campus. For a family that values a very small, rural, tight-knit school environment and is willing to engage directly with teachers and the principal to understand academic progress, McCormick School may be a reasonable fit. For a family that relies on published test scores and broad program offerings to evaluate a school, the gaps in the data will be a limitation. This is a place where personal relationships and word of mouth carry more weight than publicly reported metrics.
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